Editors' Review

This nifty app cycles through a series of specified images as wallpaper for your system--you set the speed and time and date for each change, then the app handles the work automatically.

Wallpaper Cycler Lite launches a three-paned interface similar in look and feel to the familiar e-mail client design. The left, vertical pane lists a directory of wallpaper categories, the upper horizontal pane on the right lists wallpaper images in the selected category, and the lower horizontal pane displays a thumbnail of a selected image. A series of icons arranged across the top of the panes may intimidate novices initially, but the contextual help soon will have any new user navigating easily and confidently. This free app performed quite well during our tests. A wizard for setting up a category for wallpapers was available at each launch, and setting up additional categories--and adding wallpapers to a cycle--was a simple process, thanks to the intuitively designed interface. Setting the image-change frequency was a snap, and we appreciated that we could choose cycle times based on time of year as well as daily hours.

There's a nag screen at launch that urges you to register your copy, but that's a minimal irritation. The Layouts feature is disabled in this Lite version, but most home users won't notice--the feature lets you configure different wallpapers for each monitor on your system. But overall, this is a neat little tool.

Publisher's Description

+

From NuonSoft:
Wallpaper Cycler Lite is an easy to use, yet powerful desktop wallpaper manager/changer to get rid of that boring static wallpaper on your desktop. You can change the wallpaper with a specific delay or at specific times. Wallpapers are easily managed in multi-level categories which can have time constraints. An advanced random selection algorithm is included to ensure that all wallpapers are randomly chosen before wallpaper appears again. Wallpaper Cycler can also monitor your CPU load when it wants to cycle and prevent cycling when your CPU is too busy, has several types of tiling modes, can automatically calculate a suitable desktop background color, can make the icons transparent on your desktop or hide them completely, supports system wide hotkeys, and has shell integration. Version 3.6.0.180 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.

What's new in this version:

Version 3.6.0.180 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.

The blizzard of options. It (or I) could only partially load 229 of 700+ images in the single folder I wanted to use. Not what I'd call a simple interface.

Summary

I was looking for a simple interface to randomly rotate wallpapers from a folder of 700 or so images I have collected for this purpose. This sounded very simple to do, but after partially loading the folder it stopped and gave me a message that I needed to navigate thru several menus to find a list of "exceptions" that needed to be deleted so that all the different image formats could be used. After several attempts I gave up and deleted wallpaper-cycler.. I have no doubt that this was my fault, but being a casual computer user I am simply not prepared to navigate, what seems to me, an overly complex menu of options. Several of the reviews including the CNET editor used words like "simple" & "easy". I think you folks are overestimating the computer literacy of a large swath of users.

easy to use, most used commands are in notification tray, options for everything you could possibly want.

Cons

nothing! Took a minute of searching to figure out how to make the program automatically synchronize with the folder/s of my choice, but not a problem.

Summary

I noticed the last reviewer said there were too many options, but the program installs with the options configured for normal use. If you take about 5 minutes to look through the options (yes there are a lot) they are very easy to understand. this program is configurable to any possible setup you could imagine, I absolutely love it. Every time i save a wallpaper it automatically synchronizes. I can choose whichever folder/s i want to monitor, or if needed you can of course turn these options off and synchronize manually. I especially like the icon in the notification tray, because it too is filled with options! you can change the wallpaper from right there. It doesn't seem to take up any of my cpu power at all. this is a wonderful program that i would pay money for. Thank you very much, i never thought it would be so nice and refreshing to have my wallpapers change.

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